


You never enjoy the world aright

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Conversations, F/M, Nuns, Roman Catholicism, Romance, Star - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 19:36:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8909338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: The nuns moved within Mansion House, subtly altering the world.





	

“If you were mine, I’d see you crowned with stars, the moon at your feet,” he said, standing close enough to touch her.

“Jedediah! Hush! You’ll offend the nuns, they’ll think you blaspheme,” Mary said, continuing to pull her needle through the length of linen, not looking at him. She remembered how it felt to sew shirts for Gustav, measuring them against him and how she felt helping Caroline make little dresses for the boys, her own wishes embroidered in with the drawn threadwork, the delicate frills at the neck and cuff. It was so distant now, it was like the memory of a dream, fragmented and elusive, not like anything she’d lived. Now, a man made love to her while she sewed a shroud and she was most concerned that Sister Mary Joanna would be shocked at his heresy.

“And furthermore,” she said, breaking off the thread and knotting it, careful not to waste even the scantest portion, “I should never be yours.” It startled him as she intended though she would not let him suffer long.

“I belong only to myself. There is no possession between us, not I of you nor you of me, we are only two independent souls who may choose to walk beside the other. Would you walk with me now? We are wanted on the other ward, I think, I hear Corporal Weatherby calling,” she added, folding the cloth gently and setting it in its basket, atop its sadly needed fellows, standing and wishing it were decorous to stretch her cramped muscles. She bent to pick up the basket and he was even closer to her, just that much taller than Gustav, his breath soft and sweet at her temple as he spoke.

“I will always choose to be beside you, Mary. But you are wrong, I think. For you do possess me, better me, whether or not you want to, or mean to,” he said and took the basket from her as he could not take her arm. “And you are the queen of my heaven, but to please you, I won’t say it so the nuns can hear, only you.”

Now she could not help but glance at him and see in his eyes his ardent affection and hopeful intention, to persuade and console, to make her understand she was beloved. It was not the most horrid feeling, she reflected, to be the subject of such heresy as he spoke and she smiled to think it. He did not smile back but he nodded, like a courtier, a lover, a supplicant. She had not made him an Abolitionist yet, to see the freedom that was the water for love’s thirst, for those whom men enslaved and those enslaved to their heart’s dearest desire, but she would persevere, would trample the moon if she had to.

**Author's Note:**

> This prompt was "star." The title is, most unusually, *not* Emily Dickinson, but Thomas Traherne who was an English poet, clergyman, theologian, and religious writer. Little information is known about his life. The intense, scholarly spirituality in his writings has led to his being commemorated by some parts of the Anglican Communion on 10 October (the anniversary of his burial in 1674) or on September 27. The work for which Traherne is best known today is the Centuries of Meditations, a collection of short paragraphs in which he reflects on Christian life and ministry, philosophy, happiness, desire and childhood.
> 
> Jed is appropriating a phrase about the Virgin Mary being crowned with stars and sitting atop the moon, hence his Mary's comment about heresy and offending the nuns. I hope any readers understand I am using this reference with respect for its liturgical and poetic beauty.


End file.
